Mendele: Yiddish literature and language ______________________________________________________ Contents of Vol. 5.062 July 21, 1995 1) Vinkl (Daniella HarPaz) 2) Origins of Yiddish (Arnie Kuzmack) 3) Origins of Yiddish (Ellen Prince) 4) Origins of Askenazi Jewry (Fred Kotler) 5) Papirene kinder (Bob Rothstein) 1)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 17:38:45 -0500 (EST) From: harpaz@binah.cc.brandeis.edu Subject: Vinkl I know that I've already asked this question, but having received only one (and thanks for it!) reply I thought I'd try again. A graduate student here at Brandeis is very eager for information about the word "vinkl" and its current usage to mean 'club','group- meeting' and the like. Does anyone have any ideas? Thank you in advance! Daniella HarPaz 2)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 10:53:16 -0400 (EDT) From: kuzmack@umbc.edu Subject: Origins of Yiddish I am not competent to contribute to this discussion, but I can clarify one point. I think the "New" Synagogue that Alice Faber mentioned as having been built in Prague in the 16th century is the Staronova Synagoga, also known as the Altneu Schul, which I have stood in front of. The sign on it says that the original "old" portion was built in 1290; other local sources say 1270. The "new" portion was built around the outside of the original structure. Arnie Kuzmack 3)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 19 Jul 1995 23:36:46 EDT From: ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu Subject: Origins of Yiddish alice, just a note on prague: the jewish community in prague is documented as having been in existence for nearly a thousand years. and the jewish cemetery is, i think, the second oldest existing cemetery in europe and the oldest existing jewish cemetery in europe--it's very old! (it's also a very beautiful city--i heartily recommend a visit!) question for beatrice, mihkl, et al: elye bokher lived and worked in italy, as i recall. where in italy? do we know if he lived in a jewish community or just hung out with the bishop or cardinal he worked for? if a jewish community, do we know what language they spoke? this of course was pretty late--15th-16th century--but, if there was a germanic-speaking community of jews in (northern) italy _then_, there surely had to be one earlier, right? as you can see, i'm obsessed with this idea that they were speaking german before they ever got to germany. the more i think about it, the more i want to bet on it. i recently had to present a paper on language contact effects in yiddish at a creole conference in amsterdam. i started writing the paper and threw in the usual line 'yiddish wears its history on its sleeve'. imagine my surprise when it hit me that we do not know what language they spoke just before coming to germany! suddenly yiddish goes sleeveless... amnesia, wiped out, gornisht. it just doesn't make sense. all the linguistic evidence points to them having spoken a semitic language before german--the massive borrowings, even in basic vocabulary (ponim, tokhes...), possible motivations for word order changes, pragmatic influences, lots of stuff. but, pace you-know-who, it's hard to imagine a semitic-speaking community surviving any length of time on the european continent and we presume they didn't fly nonstop from the middle east to munich... :) so, when i recently learned about the deeply entrenched existence of german in northern italy down to the present time, i felt and feel that that's it! that's the 'missing link'! we've been assuming they didn't speak germanic till they got to germany but we can't figure out what )ther_ european language they could have been speaking, so maybe they were speaking _yiddish_ before they got to germany! (that is, their dialect of the local german dialect in northern italy.) and it's easier to imagine going to italy from some place where they could have been speaking semitic than to germany, i think. not having the encyclopedia judaica at home, i just checked my 1991 jewish travel guide. the listing for merano, a town in the area i'm talking about, certainly shows the current presence of german in this region: merano: synagogue and community offices, via schiller 14. telephone 23-127. president: federico steinhaus. the guide also notes that gorizia/gradica (same latitude, farther east) has a cemetery dating back to 1371. one fringe benefit: for those who delight in how old yiddish is, this, if true, would make yiddish a lot older than has hitherto been supposed since it would predate the arrival in germany. :) ellen prince 4)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 20 Jul 1995 13:54:09 -0400 (EDT) From: kotler.fred@mail.ndhm.gtegsc.com Subject: Origins of Ashkenazi Jewry I have been intrigued by the recent discussions on the origins of Yiddish and even more importantly on the origins of Ashkenazi Jewry. To see what additional information was available on the Internet, I searched the Web for "Ashkenazi" using the Lycos search engine (http://lycos.cs.cmu.edu/) and discovered a home page maintained by Kevin Brook: (http://acad.bryant.edu/~kbrook/khazaria.html) that contains a good summary of information on the demographics of the question along with a number of references for further research. Suggested readings: "Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century" by Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak "The History of the Jewish Khazars" by Douglas Morton Dunlop "The Thirteenth Tribe" by Arthur Koestler "The Ashkenazic Jews: A Slavo-Turkic People in Search of a Jewish Identity" by Paul Wexler "Khazar Studies: An Historico-Philological Inquiry into the Origins of the Khazars" Volume I. by Peter Golden Encyclopaedia Judaica and The Jewish Encyclopedia Fred Kotler 5)---------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 21 Jul 1995 00:04:37 -0400 (EDT) From: rar@slavic.umass.edu Subject: Papirene kinder David Herskovic asked about a concentration-camp song called "Papirene kinder" (5.056); Stanley Werbow reported hearing it long before the war (5.061). The theme of photographs (sent by children in America to their parents in the old country) as "papirene kinder" seems to have been used more than once. Responding to an inquiry in their _Forverts_ column on February 22, 1991, Yosl and Khane Mlotek quote a poem by Y. Adler entitled "Papirene kinder," and in their column of two weeks later they cite a song with the same title with words by Morris Rund and music by David Meyerowitz (1867-1943). The Mloteks were unable to find any published information about Morris Rund, but report that he was supposed to have been a street-singer in New York in the years before World War I. (They also quote other variants sent in by readers in 1973.) The two lines quoted by fraynd Herskovic resemble part of the refrain to the song by Rund and Meyerowitz: Papirene kinder hob ikh oyf di vent, papirene kinder -- un brekh mayne hent! Papir iz gevorn fun mayn fleysh un blut, ikh klog, veyn un shray -- un umzist mayn geshrey. Di shtiklekh papir, vos filn den zey? Papirene kinder hob ikh oyf di vent! Bob Rothstein ______________________________________________________ End of Mendele Vol. 5.062